First-class follies

“A great big dog leapt out of the bushes and ate my homework….” That may have worked in the fifth grade, but it seems many business travellers aren’t that much more inventive. One of the on-line travel agencies, getthere.com, surveyed corporate travel department managers and come up with the best excuses their clients had offered for insisting on flying first class even when the company policy was explicitly against this privilege. Number one was, “I upgraded because I can’t afford the drinks in coach”, followed by a traveller who said he had doctor’s note that he had to fly in first class. And then there’s the manager who said he was allergic to peanuts, “and that’s all they serve in coach, so I had to upgrade to first class where they serve almonds”. But missing from the list was the one we were hoping for: “I had to fly in first class because coach was full of snakes on a plane”